Up and Coming Events

Up and Coming Events

Tuesday 25 May 2010

Barefoot in the Park
“I want poetry with no shoes on,” wrote the poet Dreadlock Alien, former Birmingham poet laureate, and it seems that the co-ordinators of Barefoot in the Park have taken his statement as a call to arms. On 6 June the poetry festival returns to Leeds’ Woodhouse Moor.
Described as a ‘maelstrom of poetry, storytelling, comedy and music’, the one-day event takes place in the centre of the city’s vibrant student area, Hyde Park.
Expect sessions from a host of fantastic performers including last year’s Slam Battle champions Al Cummins and Raf Attar.
Aside from the annual and hotly contested battle, this year’s line-up also includes an art exhibition, refreshments provided by the Marvellous Tea Dance Company, a vintage inspired fashion fair and two open mic sessions.
There are plenty of opportunities for you to try out your writing skills in front of the friendly, fun-loving and barefoot crowd.

Barefoot in the Park takes place in Hyde Park, Leeds on 6 June.

Journey to the East

Chinese Rooftile, Copyright; British Museum.

A major exhibition exploring 3,000 years of Chinese culture is taking place at York Art Gallery this summer.
More than 100 remarkable objects from the British Museum will be included in the touring exhibition entitled China: Journey to the East.
The exhibition presents key enduring Chinese inventions such as the abacus. Objects will provide an insight into the three main Chinese belief systems and will shed light on the colourful Spring Festival (Chinese New Year) and the important Mid-Autumn Festival.
The show will also investigate the development of China’s writing system and its development as an art form through objects, including a writing brush and ink box from the Ming Dynasty.

Journey to the East opens 29 June.

Hermann Obrist

Herman Obrist,Movement 1914,Copyright; Museum für Gestaltung Zürich.

Half-Scottish half-German, sculptor Hermann Obrist is best known for his spiralling plaster motif often compared to Vladimir Tatlin’s iconic but unrealised ‘Monument to the third international’.
This major exhibition opening in June at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, looks at Obrist’s career as an art nouveau sculptor.
Active during the latter half of the 19th and early part of the 20th century, Obrist worked mainly in the applied arts and architecture, using motifs drawn from the structure of plants and shells in both two and three dimensions.
His remarkable surviving plaster forms are arguably the first abstract sculptures and will be shown at the institute for the first time in the UK.